More thoughts on doctors buying papers: Giving heavy weight to publishing is actually a good thing in the Chinese context. I hope they can fix the process inst

More thoughts on doctors buying papers: Giving heavy weight to publishing is actually a good thing in the Chinese context. I hope they can fix the process instead of throwing out the baby with the bath water. In China medical education for most doctors is a post-secondary one instead of post-graduate. For a doctor to be able to write a proper paper, it shows at least a few qualities many others do not possess including abilities to read and write in English, keep up-to-date with medical research in one's specialty, and do some quantitative analysis etc. This is regardless of the originality or importance of the findings. Yes it is a low bar but it is still better than alternatives. The hospitals have a need to outsource evaluations to outside experts. SCI journals are the wrong targets to outsource to and the hospitals individually do not have resources to come up with alternatives. However regulators and funding agencies can. They should black list journals that are known to publish trash for profit. They should work with publishers to come up with alternative formats that de-emphasize impact factors but instead focus on the rigor of reporting: to publish your research does not need to be original as long as it is adding independent and verifiable data points to our knowledge base; you do need to be up-to-date on your methodology and rigorous in documenting the quality of your data, however. Indeed to ease the English writing difficulty, they can provide standardized templates that could actually ease the collection of machine readable data. This way while each publication may be low value, in aggregate they can provide real value. They could treat this as a "continuing medical education" issue. Of course this does not prevent real geniuses from publishing ground-breaking research in reputable journals. They need to be realistic in that most people are simply not qualified or lucky enough to come up with ground breaking research in their career, esp. when their main job is clinical rather than research.